Florida will keep roadside emergency phones in place

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7/27/2005

Bucking a nationwide
trend, the Florida DOT has said it will not remove its 2,750 emergency call
boxes along its roadways.

While states like
Pennsylvania and Rhode Island have already taken down their roadside phones,
and other states – including Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Louisiana
are consider it, the Sunshine State has decided to keep its call boxes, despite
the fact that 53 percent of drivers nationwide carry cell phones, according to
several wireless trade associations’ statistics.

“While cell phone
saturation is 50 percent, still in Florida we have a lot of elderly and migrant
farm workers whose vehicles are subject to breakdowns and don’t have cell
phones,” Nick Adams, spokesperson for the Florida DOT, told the Daytona
Beach News-Journal. “There are no active plans to do away with motorist aid
call boxes.”

Initial figures showed a decrease in the use of the boxes in Florida from
56,674 in 1998 to 27,040 in 2002. However, Adams said the figure was skewed by
the fact that the system tallied a call every time the door to the box was
opened, not every time a call was made, the News-Journal reported. The
method was changed in 2002, and more current data showed a drop of only 3.1
percent.